In the old far west, before there were cowboys and Indians, there were Indians and mountain men -- beaver fur hunters exploring the far reaches of the Louisiana Purchase, the upper Missouri. Arguably the most famous of these was Christopher “Kit” Carson, who went west as a young man and started trapping beaver in 1827.
Over the next 40 years, he traversed almost every river, stream, valley and desert in all eleven western states - no map, no GPS. With all that geographic knowledge in his back pocket, so to say, he was the best choice to lead U. S. government explorer John C. Fremont on his investigative journey throughout the Rocky Mountains.
Kit had been there before, knew several Indian languages and was an expert in successfully surviving the rigors of a wild and rough land.
Fremont’s 1845 book of his travels often lauded Kit’s wilderness expertise, and when it became a best seller, Kit Carson (only 5 ft. 4 inches tall), was catapulted into that elusive status of “national hero.”
And that was just the beginning. A part of the 1846 California revolution, he participated in securing the transfer of New Mexico, Arizona, California and parts of Colorado, Utah and Nevada from Mexico to the United States, made official by the Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo in 1848.
He had attempted to settle down with a wife in 1843 in Taos, New Mexico, but Indian depredations and ultimately the Civil War called him back into the public eye.
 He led the New Mexico Volunteers in the Battle of Valverde in 1862, and as a member of the U. S. Army officer corps, was required to round up the Navajo Indians in 1863. They had been raiding settlers and other Indians for well over 150 years and the people of New Mexico demanded the US government force them to stop. Then the army sent him onto the great plains to subdue the Comanche, Kiowa and Apache. Narrowly escaping a massacre that would have rivaled that of George Custer, he returned home to care for his 7 children, act as Commandant of Ft. Garland in Colorado and assist his beloved Utes in their treaty negotiations with the United States.
He died peacefully reclining on a buffalo robe in 1868, age 59, a year before the Transcontinental Railroad was completed. Only then came the "cowboys.”
Want more details? Read Kit Carson, The Life of an American Border Man by David Remley, Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 2011... the latest of over 100 books about Kit. |